


Self-Destruction, Kaner Style

by orphan_account



Series: ‘Til Death Do Us Part [2]
Category: Hockey RPF, Real Person Fiction, Sports RPF
Genre: And Duncs is Hulk-mad at Jonny and Brent for hurting poor little bb Patrick, And they are a forver kind of thing, And this is not how you're supposed to tag oops, Because Patty is Patty, But Jonny loves Brent, But he can't, Character Death, Chicago Blackhawks, Drug Abuse, Drug Use, M/M, Past Drug Use, Patrick loves Jonny, Self-Destruction, So he tries to fix Patty, Unrequited Love, Unrequited!Patrick, Which destroys Patrick, past actions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-28
Updated: 2013-07-28
Packaged: 2017-12-21 16:10:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/902252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you wondered how we got to "That Call"...here's how.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Self-Destruction, Kaner Style

                Jonny cried.

                Hard.

                The ugly kind of crying that turned into wheezing and choking and snot all over Brent’s shirt.

                Because Jonny knew.

                Knew just what Duncs had seen, because he’d seen pictures of the last time it had happened: Patrick lying somewhere in their apartment, curls mussed, lips blue, unmoving, and so oddly, utterly still.

                Knew how it had torn Duncs apart to watch, totally helpless—because Drunk Kaner did what Drunk Kaner wanted and there was no way either Duncs or Jonny or anybody else was gonna stop him—as Patrick screamed that he wanted to disappear into his head for a while because it was a hell of a lot nicer than the real world and ripped open cupboard after cupboard and packed himself with Vicodin and Lortab and Norco and Ponstel and Naprosyn and Trezix and rainbows of orange and green and blue Oxy to fill the hole in his chest, topping it off with a couple shots of vodka for good measure.

                And Jonny knew that Duncs could tell Patrick that he loved him until he was blue in the face and then could tell him another hundred or so times and Patrick would still never believe him. Because it wasn’t like in stories where the three little words that he _knew_ Patrick craved more than anything else could fix the problem because this was real life and it was Patrick and why would anything ever be easy when it came to Patrick?

                He knew.

                But that didn’t make it hurt any less.

                Long before it was Tazer-and-Kaner, before it was Jonny-and-Peaks, before it was Jon-and-Pat, and even before it was Jonathan-and-Patrick, it had been Jonny-and-Seabs. And everyone assumed that Kaner took Seabsie’s place and Duncs moved into Jonny’s place but none of that was real, not for Jonny. Yeah, he liked Patrick, the kid was okay, but he was nothing special. Just a loudmouthed American kid who was cocky and arrogant and everything that Jonny absolutely _was not_. Not Brent, not by a long shot.

                And yet.

                Somewhere along the line he had stopped being Patrick and started being Kaner and Jonny learned all sorts of stupid things about him like how he went through mouth guards ridiculously fast since he was always chewing on them and how his nervous tick was pulling the left side of his lower lip into his mouth and chewing at _that_ and how he had more hair care products that Jonny’s _mother_ and how he was absolutely head over heels in love with Jonny.

                It was still burned into Jonny’s brain, a wound never allowed to scab or heal, the day when Patrick had realized that Jonny didn’t love him back. The worst part was that he wouldn’t probably ever have figured it out Jonny hadn’t flat-out told him. He winced to remember it.

                Patrick had been off-his-ass drunk ( _quelle surprise_ , eh?) when he had come back to their hotel room, messed up about being in the box for not only the Hurricanes GWG, but also their insurance goal. He was already sniffling when he’d stripped down to his boxers as Jonny watched highlights from the nights other games. He sat down hard on the end of Jonny’s bed, glaring blankly at the TV. “Uh, Pat? Not your bed.”

                “Wanna stay,” he mumbled crawling up the bed to lay his head on Jonny’s thigh.

                “C’mon, Kaner. Get outta here. I want to go to sleep.”

                “Wanna stay,” he repeated. “Wanna sleep with you.” He mumbled something else, but Jonny couldn’t hear it.

                “What?”

                Patrick peered up at him, pouting with genuine sadness, “Want you ta kiss me an’ make it better, Tazer.”

                Jonny’s breath left his body with a sharp note of surprise. He stared at Patrick for a second, another second, a third stretching-too-long, stretching-forever second. “Pat, I can’t.”

                He sat up and his lower lip trembled in a way that was just so _Patrick_ that it hurt. “But…but I _love_ you.”

                “I know,” he murmured, his voice wracked with pain. “I know. And, yeah, I love you, too, Pat, like you’re my brother. But that’s it. That’s all, the extent, the end of it. I love you; I am not _in_ love with you.”

                With a broken cry that Jonny still heard in his nightmares, Patrick had grabbed his sweats and a t-shirt—one of Jonny’s, he would later discover—from the floor and flown from the room.

                And that was the day that Jonathan Toews accidentally set his favorite winger on a downward spiral of self-destruction that he would never, ever recover from.

                Duncs had been so mad when he’d found out what had happened. He’d wanted to rip Jonny’s head off and probably would have if Brent hadn’t gotten in his way. “He’s just a kid!” he’d screamed at Jonny, trapped in Brent arms, the bigger man bodily holding him back. “Why would you do something like this?!” Good ol’ Duncs. Nobody could cut through bullshit to the heart of a matter quite like he could.

                There were no future plans for Jonny and Patrick.

                But Jonny and Brent? They were a forever kinda thing.

**Author's Note:**

> Part Two of the now-trilogy about Brent/Jonny and unrequited!/dead!Kaner and angry!/super-sad!Duncs.


End file.
